One of the things that have been long disliked about banner notifications ever since the launch of iOS 7 and continuing to current iOS releases are just how much space they eat up.

A new free jailbreak tweak called Resero 9 is now available in Cydia that shrinks down the size of your notifications banners so they’re less obtrusive, and we’ll show you how it works in this review.

Notification banners on a diet

Your typical notification banners in iOS 9 are overly intrusive, and they’ve been that way since the major UI overhaul in iOS 7.

They span the entire length of the navigation bar, which means that when you’re busy trying to use an app and someone won’t leave you alone, you have to manually dismiss the banners over and over again in order to get to the navigation bar’s buttons.

With Resero 9, your notification banners are made a whole lot smaller such that they don’t use up any more space than they have to. In fact, after installation, the entire banner with the app icon and the notification preview will take up no more space than your Status Bar will.

There are a ton of benefits to the smaller notification banners, but the biggest is going to be that you can easily tap on any of your navigation bar buttons when you receive notifications because they aren’t going to be in the way.

Case in point:

As you can see, even when I get a notification, Resero 9 will let me ignore the notification and continue using my device, even if that means tapping navigation bar buttons. Apple’s banner notification won’t let me do that.

Other tweaks like Resero 9

There are certainly lots of tweaks like Resero 9 that have accomplished the same task, but it seems Resero 9 was created with iOS 9.3.3 in mind, as it works flawlessly with the new jailbreak.

That said, many of the older tweaks still have yet to be updated and it’s harder to recommend them now that Resero 9 is out.

My thoughts on Resero 9

Because I use my device so much and people are always texting me throughout the day, it’s almost a must-have for me. I get so annoyed by the influx of notification banners that keep me from using my navigation bar, and I’m sure this tweak is going to help with that.

I love that the new notification banners only take up about the space of the Status Bar, as it really reduces the size and gets them out of the way.

Despite the smaller size, the notification banners still display all the information about the notification you need to see, including the app icon and a preview of the text from the notification.

Wrapping up

For those that want smaller notification banners on their newly-jailbroken iOS 9.3.3 device, Resero 9 is a great tweak to try. It works with all apps, not just the Messages app, and really helps with device usability.

The tweak is available as a free download from Cydia’s BigBoss repository. There are no options to configure and the tweak gets to work immediately after being instsalled.